good-bye Dapper

I’d like to say “good-bye and thanks for the fun,”, but it wasn’t fun.

I installed Ubuntu on my Thinkpad, 32-Kubuntu on one workstation, and Kubuntu AMD 64 on another. The second two are going the way of the dodo. What, you say, how can I be so mean to the darlingest Linux distribution of all? Easy. It started it.

Ever since I installed the *buntus, they’ve been nothing but trouble. Every day I’m fixing something. Breezy wasn’t too bad; just the usual hassles with printers and scanners, because mine are not well-supported in Linux. So that’s not *buntu’s fault. Things went majorly to pot when I dist-upgraded to Dapper, and that is *buntu’s fault:

So this one guy can't make his Distro work. Are we to assume that the other 10 million users (number pulled from ass - I have no clue how many people really use Dapper) of that Distro just have more patience, have higher tolerance for non-working software, don't use those non-functioning features, are too stupid to notice, what?

I can imagine that Shuttleworth is reading this guys article and then gets on the phone to headquarters saying "Ok guys, the scam is up, we've been outed, this Schroder guy says we suck so lets start shutting down the offices".

Who cares what this Schroder guy thinks, does, smells like? Do whatever it is you want to do, just stay off your whiny little soapbox.

While I'm not particularly enamoured with Kubuntu Dapper Drake (I haven't tried Ubuntu), I think all this article shows is that there are Linux distros better suited for Linux newbies.

Part of the wonderful richness of Linux is the wide variety of distros. With due-dilligence (and some guidance), a suitable Linux distro can be found for almost any computer user.

Indeed, srlinux's most recent review (in my opinion, one of her best as she keeps getting better and better) discusses Xandros 4.0 which is probably much more suitable for the inexperienced Linux user. While it wouldn't be my preferred distro, it certainly has its place.

I must confess, some of the statements here found me a little bewildered. I'm new to linux, apart from an experimentation phase back in '00 with some Red Hat thing, not the sticky fumble I wish to recall. Ok, new to linux, brand new. I tried quite a few recently, suse (10.1), xandros (3.0), linspire (5.0), ubuntu (dapper 6.06) and I must say that ubuntu left the least mess and no wet spots. Xandros I didn't like, too much fiddle to get the wireless working, same with linspire and suse took forever to install and took its ball home when hitting the video card drivers. In fact they all did except ubuntu. Although, to its credit, xandros did come back when I functioned through the vid outputs. This linux thing was getting frustrating.

Back in the forums (pre Ubuntu) this name appeared again and again, ubuntu. What the hell, download, burn and install on my old test machine, toshiba satelite 25somethingorother dvd. Now all the others didn't like the trident 95wotsit card, ubuntu did. No frigging about with refresh rates and the megahurts of the korean screen assemblers tight underpants in X config files, it just worked. Next came the wireless card (netgear), my xandros ndiswrapper experience to hand (getting into this linux thing now!) and didn't need it. Connect it said and connect I did. Ok, now what? Why can't I play mp3's? A few google minutes later and voila, automatix installed and every codec I needed on it's way. Everything working and not a new grey hair in sight (although it is hard to guarantee that one).

After 3 days of ubuntu on the old laptop, I took the plunge, backed up (!!!!) the presario, read the last rights and installed it on my main laptop. The one my wife and I fight over... er share. Installed, everything working in less than an hour. Not one problem. Automatix and Synaptic clicks later and everything I need is on there. Ok, sometimes it's down to the prompt for a quick sudo, but I was like that in windows, wife likes the UI and hails the russian tv she watches online, media player st-st-st-stuttered when it played, totem? Nope, plays fine. Only gripe my wife has is the keyboard switcher, she translates, russian and english and swaps between the two. Ubuntu/gnome is a bit fiddly and doesn't quite work properly with layouts, I'll look at it later. I'm sure half an hour poking around will have the answer. As for hardware, scanners, printers, cameras, webcameras, usb memory keys, not one complaint.

So now Ubuntu is on two laptops and I ubuntu'd the server last weekend. That took a bit more fiddling/flattening/fiddling, being new to php, apache and mysql, remote desktop sessions, ftp and linux permissions but forums are friendly places and the answers are very forthcoming.

The "why move from windows" reason? I actually had to learn something that was on my CV for a contract! Learn it quick too! So now developing on linux, perl, tcl, python with apache and php. Plodding along.

I still need to keep the last remaining windows pc in the house for MS dev, but momo is looking interesting and I am keeping my eyes fixed on that one, and the fact that the russian input works better (for now). Plus my wife uses the remote desktop and controls XP from Ubuntu with no hassles.

So why bewildered? Well if a complete linux newbie (getting the lingo too now) can be a happy chappy with the install of desktop and server, I can't see why the complaints. Although I have used little else.

A few moments ago, renowned Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman had the pleasure of announcing the general availability of the Linux kernel 4.8.13 and Linux kernel 4.4.37 LTS maintenance updates.
While many rolling GNU/Linux distributions have just received the Linux 4.8.12 kernel, it looks like Linux kernel 4.8.13 is now available with more improvements and bug fixes, but it's not a major milestone. According to the appended shortlog and the diff since last week's Linux 4.8.12 kernel release, a total of 46 files were changed, with 214 insertions and 95 deletions.

openSUSE's Douglas DeMaio reports on the latest Open Source and GNU/Linux technologies that landed in the repositories of the openSUSE Tumbleweed rolling operating system.

What Is A VPN Connection? Why To Use VPN?

We all have heard about VPN sometime. Most of us normal users of internet use it. To bypass the region based restrictions of services like Netflix or Youtube ( Yes, youtube has geo- restrictions too). In fact, VPN is actually mostly used for this purpose only. ​

The Libreboot C201 from Minifree is really really really ridiculously open source

Open source laptops – ones not running any commercial software whatsoever – have been the holy grail for free software fans for years. Now, with the introduction of libreboot, a truly open source boot firmware, the dream is close to fruition.
The $730 laptop is a bog standard piece of hardware but it contains only open source software. The OS, Debian, is completely open source and to avoid closed software the company has added an Atheros Wi-Fi dongle with open source drivers rather than use the built-in Wi-Fi chip.

Latest News

Games for GNU/Linux

Feral Interactive was proud to inform the media about the upcoming Christmas release of the immense DLC pack for the Total War: WARHAMMER turn-based strategy and real-time tactics video game to SteamOS and Linux.
Last month, on November 22, the UK-based video game publisher Feral Interactive brought us the Linux/SteamOS port of the astonishing and addictive Total War: WARHAMMER game developed by Creative Assembly and published by Sega. And now, they promise to port the Total War: WARHAMMER Realm of The Wood Elves DLC too.

Containers News

Victor Vieux from the open source Docker app container engine released new development versions of the upcoming Docker 1.13.0 major milestone and Docker 1.12.4 maintenance update for the current stable series.
The third Release Candidate (RC) version of Docker 1.13.0 arrived a couple of days ago with numerous minor tweaks and fixes to polish the software before it's tagged as ready for production and hits the streets, which should happen in the coming weeks. Docker 1.13.0 RC3 comes two after the release of the second RC build.

The conventional wisdom of Linux containers is that each service should run in its own container. Containers should be stateless and have short lifecycles. You should build a container once, and replace it when you need to update its contents rather than updating it interactively. Most importantly, your containers should be disposable and pets are decidedly not disposable. Thus the conventional wisdom is if your containers are pets, you’re doing it wrong. I’m here to gently disagree with that, and say that you should feel free to put your pets in containers if it works for you.

AMDGPU News

This morning's AMDGPU-PRO 16.50 preview included some 16.40 vs. 16.50 hybrid driver benchmarks, but for those wondering how 16.50 compares to Mesa 13.1-dev for RadeonSI OpenGL and RADV Vulkan, here are some preliminary tests for the two current Vulkan AAA Linux games.

AMD ran into a snag getting out the updated proprietary hybrid Linux driver stack this morning, but it's now available for download from AMD.
This page has the 16.50 Linux x86/x86_64 driver available for download.

While AMD developers have been working to improve their "DAL" (now known as "DC") display code for the better part of the past year and this code is needed for new hardware support as well as supporting HDMI/DP audio on existing AMDGPU-enabled hardware plus other features, it's still not going to be accepted to the mainline kernel in its current form.